In today’s business world, it is a common thing for almost every specialist to have an email signature. What is an email signature? It is a block at the end of the emails that enlists the information about the sender.
An email signature is the point that reflects your business, that’s why it is of great importance for your success. Essential parts of an email signature include company logo, name, social media icons, in some cases it may include a call-to-action banner.
In this article, we will show you how to properly organize your email signatures. When performed accurately, you will be able to build rapport with your clients and accomplish your business goals with every email you send.
What a professional email signature should have
Today, email signatures practically replaced business cards. Not using it may be considered a missed opportunity. Email signatures help you present yourself in a professional and sophisticated way and provide the recipient with key information about you, including:
- Personal photo/company logo (sometimes both can be used)
- Personal and business details
- Contact information
- Social media icons
In some cases, it might also include:
- Your work schedule, so that the recipient knows when they can reach out to you
- Your office’s address
- Your website
- Relevant links, in the form of a call-to-action banner
In the process of building your own email signature, you should not neglect clear wording and readability. You don’t want the recipients to struggle with the meaning of your position or misleading titles. Try to be as clear as possible!
How to emphasize contact and business details in your email signature
The headline of a professional email signature should definitely be your name that is followed by your affiliation, which is usually your job title, your company, etc. To highlight the name of your company and get the attention of recipients, you can add a logo.
Further, you should include your contact details – it can be your contact phone number, your website, your office address, in some cases it is even possible to add your email once again so that it’s easier for a recipient to copy it, however most of the time the reply button will do.
In order to highlight the abovementioned information, it’s important to use the icons for better visibility. Another option is to use first letters, which are less visual, but the idea is clear (t – telephone number; m – mobile phone number; e – email address; etc.)
Dos and don'ts of presenting your contact details in your email signature:
- Get rid of unnecessary information. It’s better to be concise and exclude the email address in our email signature, since the reader may use the reply button. Keep in mind, there is no need to add three different phone numbers, only one relevant number that leads to you will be much more than enough.
- Be sure the links you add are relevant for the recipient. Add a hyperlink to your website, social media, etc. only if you are sure the recipient will be interested in it.
- Be careful with what number you include in your signature. Make sure that the number you added is the one you actively use. If you are not interested in receiving phone calls, don’t add it. If you do not deliver what you promised, why bother promising?
- Make sure the contact details you add belong to you. There are cases when people prefer to add third-party calling services instead of their real contact details. Thus, it unknowingly results in reputational damage.
- Be consistent in terms of colors. Make sure your social media icons match your logo and overall design.
- Don’t forget to include international prefix in your contact number. Most of the businesses operate around the world nowadays. Thus, in order to prevent your international colleagues from potential issues related to misdialing your contact number, make sure your number has an international prefix.
- Make your email signature mobile friendly. Every day, more and more professionals prefer to open emails on their phones. That’s why you have to make your signature design intuitive and easy to read for mobile users. You must pay attention to the scale of your signature – make sure the size of your text, links, and buttons are large enough for a mobile screen.
Image, logo? Or use both?
Even though your email signature section is not the first thing that your clients and colleagues see, your image and logo are still the most memorable parts of it.
Your image and logo are the face of your company. And that shouldn’t be a big surprise to you, our brain tends to capture visual content much easier than text. That’s why you should really focus on how to make your logo and image as attractive as possible.
- Smile! Smile! Smile! A smiling face is a very simple and straightforward thing that improves your image a lot. However, it may not be as simple as it seems. The most important thing is to make your smile friendly and natural.
- Try not to overdo it – it may result in making it look fake. If you struggle to make a smiling face, you can try lowering your chin. It makes your face look friendlier than if you’re posing with your chin raised.
- Quality is always important. For most of the users online, low-quality is associated with spammy content, that’s why you should always think about it. And, as always, keep in mind – you mustn’t overdo it. You don’t want your clients to waste their time downloading your signature content.
- Make sure you crop your images properly. The safest way would be to use proportions 250×250.
- Don’t underestimate your background! Consider blurring it or using a plain, contrasting background that highlights your face.
What about your company’s logo? The best possible solution would be to create a separate section for it. You can also create a GIF with your company’s logo and your image.
Using a GIF might be considered a better option since it ensures efficient use of limited signature space. However, keep in mind that the use of any animations might be dragging too much attention and seem distracting to your recipients, that’s why most of the professionals tend to stick to either their image or company logo.
Your email signature has a marketing intent? Don’t forget to use call to action (CTA)!
For marketing specialists, the ability to gather analytic data might be of good use. By building a campaign URL and attaching the link to your banner, you will be able to gather all the necessary data you need.
Keep in mind, the appearance of your banners may look whatever you want! You can either use eye-catching GIFs or plain images with straightforward messages, videos or Instagram posts – you name it!
What if you don't need CTA banners?
Alternatively, if your email doesn’t have a marketing intent, you can complete the section with booking links, industry disclaimer or legal requirements.
Apart from that, booking links, for instance, might be of good use if you find yourself in the situation when your colleagues are always looking to book a meeting with you. You’ll facilitate the whole process simply by letting your colleagues or clients access your calendar in your email signature.
On the one hand, you might want to use such a tool as Calendly. It is considered to be a basic free tool that is integrated with Google or Office 365 calendar. On the other hand, you can use another popular tool, YouCanBook.Me. However, to use YouCanBook.Me you’ll have to get a monthly subscription for $7.
Aside from booking links, you can use the section for industry disclaimers or legal requirements. If you belong to legal, financial, and insurance industries you might have heard of specific guidelines on email usage.
The idea of these guidelines lies in private information preservation from being transmitted. Here’s why, you might want to check up on your industry regulations and include a disclaimer in your signature about email transmission.
Why you need social media icons
Then again, in order to develop your personal brand, you’re definitely supposed to have social media presence. On top of that, it helps your clients to gain more knowledge about you and what you care about.
In the modern world, people can tell a lot about you just by seeing your posts. Your social media is your portrait. Your social media helps your clients humanize your brand.
For this reason, you should employ this way of self-promotion, since social media provides immense potential for business. According to the research by Marketing Insider Group, 52% of social media marketers believe social media positively influences their company’s revenue and sales.
In your email signatures, social media icons impact not only your business potential, but also improve the visual aspect of your signature. Vivid icons make your signature look fresh and attractive.
How to Make a Business Email Signature
Your business email signature plays an integral role in today’s communication, assisting in your self-presentation and introduction. Identifying the specific goals that you want to achieve with your corporate email signatures will help you to make a tailor-made solution for all of your communication channels.
Taking into account the share of email users in the US, which makes about 91.8%, proves the scale of email communication. For obvious reasons, email communication tends to be formal.
Making an efficient email signature for your business needs is not rocket science. You don’t have to go out of your way to make your email signatures do the talking and achieve your business objectives.
We have already shared suggestions on how to make a professional email signature and the most essential does and don’ts. In this part of the article, we will walk you through the use of the best practices of making business email signatures, the manual installation process, and formatting options.
Why you need a business email signature
Primary tool for communication
It is important to understand that email signature is a primary tool of communication. And it is really hard to doubt, keeping in mind the number of sent and received emails worldwide, which makes a whopping 319.6 billion emails per day!
Image and reputation booster
When properly implemented, email signatures will help you to thrive on them and boost the reputation of your company and your personal image. Email signature is a simple and the most straight-forward way to stand out.
Business Cards of Digital World
What’s more, the time and overall trends in communication transformed business email signatures into business cards of present days. Here’s why, in order to keep up with the trends, it is important to take advantage of all the necessary means, such as business email signatures.
The main reasons why businesses need consistently branded email signatures are as follows:
They help to create a professional and trustworthy image for the company and its employees.
They reinforce the brand identity and awareness by displaying the logo, colors, fonts and other elements of the visual identity.
They provide useful information and contact details for the recipients, such as the name, title, phone number, website and social media links of the sender.
They can be used to promote the company’s
products, services, events, awards or achievements by adding a call to action or a banner.
They ensure compliance with legal requirements and regulations by including disclaimers, privacy policies or other disclosures.
What you should include in your email signatures
Earlier, we’ve already touched upon the points that must be included in a professional email signatures. However, the employment of the specific points should solely depend on your corporate needs, and it is always better to consider thoroughly if you need them.
1. Contact details
The fundamental objective of your email signature is to provide your contact information. It displays the information about your company and allows your recipients to identify your duties and responsibilities. Contact details in most cases imply the inclusion of your phone number that presents your recipients the channel of immediate communication.
The most common set of contact details in your email signatures is presented in the following hierarchy:
Full name
Job title
Company name
Department (optional)
Business address
Phone number
Mobile number (optional)
2. Website links and social media
A further significant step of your email signature is about adding website links and social media icons. As it has been mentioned above, the most effective way to link your social media in your email signatures is to use social media icons.
It is obvious that the impact of website links on your email signatures cannot be underestimated. However, in order to bring the specific link to the attention of your recipients, it is significant to present a limited number of options.
Do not overload your email signatures with unnecessary links that might serve as a distraction to your reader and burden your email signatures.
3. Visual elements, call-to-action banners, further enhancements
One of the trickiest elements of email signatures are visual elements and call-to-actions banners. Some companies prefer to defy this sort of features in favor of enhanced professionalism, following the rule of simplicity. On the other hand, correct implementation will allow you to expand your email signature’s full potential and help you to meet a good number of goals that range from promoting videos to boosting your company website traffic.
Manual email signature installation guide
Google Docs Email Signatures vs. HTML Email Signatures
There is a good number of users and firms who prefer to create their email signature in Google Docs. The end result is then just copied and pasted to their email platform settings. However, this sort of email signature is not HTML. The main advantage of HTML email signatures is their flexibility and solid performance. HTML email signatures can be developed by email signature generators such as the tool by MailSignatures. On the other hand, if you are looking for a solution that will create HTML signatures for the whole organization and allow you to gain full control over your company-wide email signatures, a powerful email signature management tool will meet your needs.
How to add email signatures in Gmail
The majority of email platforms allow their users to add customized email signatures and install them through settings to make them automatically appear at the bottom of your emails. To add email signatures in Gmail, you have to:
Go to “Settings” of your email platform
Find “Signature” section
Click “Create new” button
Paste your signature in the text box/editor
Adjust the size of the font or images
Save your signature
7 business email signature format examples in 2023
You can format business email signatures in a huge number of ways, depending on the needs of your company or your personal preferences. However, the priority of company-wide email signatures should be solid consistency.
Even though it is possible to manually prepare email signatures and install them in your employees’ inboxes, it still takes time and human resources. That’s when email signature management tools such as BulkSignature come into use.
Understanding of why email signature software solution are important will help you to paint a better picture and decide if your business should start using one.
1. Plain email signature
Even though using plain email signatures might seem appealing to some of the specialists from the field of business, it is important to understand that this way you will barely be able to capitalize on the use of such an approach. Among the main disadvantages of this type of email signature is the absence of branding. Which in turn may result in being ignored by your recipients.
The format of this sort of email signatures is straight-to-the-point and includes your full name, title, company name and website, phone number, and in some cases your department or address. Some parts of your email signature might be highlighted by the selected color.
2. Email signature with company logo
Adding your corporate logo will help you to diversify your email signature and make it stand out, bringing branding to your email. This way, it will definitely drag your recipients’ attention, and will eventually have a professional impression on them.
The position of your logo depends on its size and dimensions. Rectangular logos for instance might be placed above your name or below the content. On the other hand, the best position for squared logos is common to be on the right or left side of your email signature.
3. Email signature with company logo and banner
The use of both a logo and a banner is a common practice that is accepted and used by numerous companies. It is suggested to use the same color language for the font highlighting color and the banner. This way, you will be able to create a continual design of your email signature that looks both professional and attractive.
The positioning in this case is performed the following way: your banner is placed at the bottom, while your logo is usually supposed to be on the left or right side of your email signature.
4. Email signature with personal photo
Even though personal photos can be seen on various email signatures, it is still worth considering if your business needs it. The main idea of a personal photo is about transferring individualism of team members. If you believe that each and every employee of your company should be considered individually, the use of personal photos might be a good idea.
On the other hand, email signature management tools such as BulkSignature provide you with the custom email signature groups for your employees. You will be able to assign specific email signatures to the specific groups/departments in your company.
5. Email signature with social media icons
Social media icons are widely used in email signatures. Some people believe that the primary purpose of email signature is to promote social media channels. This might be true for some organizations, since social media icons definitely help organizations in expanding networking of their employees and are good at promoting social media channels.
The positioning of your social media channels can be quite flexible and appear in any location of your email signature. The most common spot for your social media icons is usually below the contact details.
6. Full set email signature
Email signatures that consist of all the abovementioned points (logo, photo, social media icons, banners, etc.) might be considered overwhelming. Here is why the use of these options are barely used. In turn, most of the modern email signature examples that you can find online are made this way.
7. Email signature with a legal disclaimer
Email signatures with disclaimers and legal requirements can also be seen a lot. However, as we’ve already mentioned, going with disclaimers or legal requirements takes away the option of using banners in your email. It means you will have to decide between banners and disclaimers, which option will be more important for your recipients.
8. Email signature with a video link
Email signatures also present a great opportunity to promote videos. Unfortunately, adding videos directly to your HTML email signatures is not feasible. Nevertheless, you can create an appealing image that can serve as a thumbnail for your video. Afterwards, by linking the image to your video, you will be able to generate more views. The optimal location for your thumbnail is at the bottom of your email signature.
Key Takeaways
- Be concise in terms of your details, include only relevant information
- The design of your email signature is your key priority — keep it neat and simple
- Professional impression can only be achieved by good quality of visuals — focus on the quality of images, logos, and banners
- Enable engagement by means of CTA banners, social media icons, images